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Friday, February 22, 2008

Simon out of Sweeping The Nation emails to alert us to the unlikely presence of Agi from Mika Bomb on the BBC News website, reporting on the different shape of the music industry in China.

We have to raise a curious eyebrow at this:

The singer made about $2000 (£1,000) a month from music royalties and live shows with her band Mika Bomb when she lived in London.

But in China, her band Long Kuan Jiu Duan can almost double that by singing just one song at a commercial gig.

The singer from Mika Bomb was raking in a grand's worth of royalties every month? Really?

Although the article is headlined 'Chaos' Of China's Music Industry, the piece is less about chaos and more about an industry that's accepted that the shape of the world has changed and it needs to explore different approaches to selling music. Is an industry where an artist can make a couple of thousand pounds for doing one song at a corporate gig in more than chaos than one where - having spent a couple of years trying to sue its customers - they're now trying to make telephone companies check every bit of data for illegal filesharing?

You might not like some of the conclusions China's music companies are reaching - the reliance on sponsorship money raises a slew of questions - but at least they're not desperately trying to find a thousand ways to preserve a business model that's more extinct than an all-male species of impotent monkeys with intimacy issues.